I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

We Are All Drazi

In my last post, I danced around the topic of nastiness in Eve's culture, a topic I
thought deserved a little more attention. I started thinking about this after reading Ripard Teg’s response to Blog Banter #54,
in which his despair about the Eve community is palpable. Go ahead and take a read. I’ll wait.

Yikes. I see a lot of
despair in that post aimed at the culture and nature of Eve players.

Now, don’t get me wrong.
I love Ripard. His blog is one of
the few I check every day, hoping for a new post. It even inspired me to start this blog. Of course, that doesn’t mean I agree with
everything he says. When it comes to
Eve’s prevailing culture, I plain disagree.

For every example he cites, I can give a personal example in which Eve players impressed me. Let me give you an example from this week. Razor
Alliance is in Doril attacking Brave Newbies as much as we possibly can. In the US TZ, we’re heavily outnumbered, and
we get into great scraps in the 20-30 man gang range. It’s good fun, but we’re constantly killing
each other. That didn’t stop Nick Cornax
from greeting me in local with some encouragement about this blog. From there, we started chatting and actually
decided to 1v1. He scouted me into
Sendaya so I could buy one of the BRAVE T1 frigs, and we fought (next time,
I’ll bring one of my own ships and it’ll end differently!) In the end, he didn’t destroy my ship or pod,
we shared some tips and fits for fighting FW pilots, and we left amicably.

This all happened despite Razor and BRAVE being at war right
now, and both of us having just finished fighting the other’s alliance. If we meet on the battlefield, I’m going to
try to kill him and he’ll do the same.
But just because we’re killing each other doesn’t mean we have to hate
each other.

After all, we’re all Drazi (those of you familiar with them
can skip the next two paragraphs).

Who were the Drazi?
In Babylon 5, there was a race of reptilians who, even few years, used
to pick either a purple or a green sash from a hat and split into two
camps. These camps would literally punch
each other into submission. The winners
got to rule that particular region for that next few years, after which the
cycle would repeat again. The sashes
themselves were entirely arbitrary. If
you took a purple sash off a Purple Drazi and swapped it with a Green Drazi’s
sash, the Purple faction would attack their former compatriot without mercy.

Now, things worked like this for centuries, until someone
got the idea that they could win much faster if they simply killed all of the
other faction instead of punching them into submission. When that happened, things started to spiral
out of control, and only the cunning application of some dye turned things
around.

By and large, I’m convinced that the majority of Eve players
are like the majority of Drazi, content to generate meaningful content for the
rest of the gameworld. But there are a
few – in the case of the Drazi, one guy – who decide they’d rather break
everything to benefit themselves. But
you don’t judge the whole group by the actions of a few.

Let me put it another way.
How many times have you fought someone, been impressed by how they
conducted themselves, and ended up becoming friends? How many times have you fought against a
corp, only to later join them? How many
times have you started a conversation with someone who killed you, and ended up
getting their fit and learning what you did wrong because the other guy was
interested in helping you out?

I’m blinded by the bright spots in Eve’s culture. I’ve seen so many, in fact, that I question
whether culture as a whole is the problem, or that there are a few bad apples
preying on newbies that make things seem so bad.

Anyone can point out select cases to support their
point. But my experience in Eve has
largely consisted on a long series of great people – both on my side and on the
other side – who are willing to treat me as a player with respect, even if they
hate the organization I belong to.

As to the rest… the cases of terrible scams… I think CCP can
do much to resolve a lot of them. Prevent
purchases of more than x PLEX until accounts are y months old. Eliminate “minimum to buy” aspects of buy
orders. Eliminate Margin Trading. No, CCP can’t nor shouldn’t stop people from
being scammed, but they do have to protect new players long enough for them to
get hooked on the game before they lose everything they have.

Because chances are that, if you can delay the point when
that scam occurs by even a few months, those new players will have had plenty
of positive experiences to make them shrug off that bad one. Then the one bad experience is just that, a
blip in an otherwise great game.

In regards to scamming, I think you need to restrict the dull scams and reward the creative ones. Being taken in by a creative scam and seeing how that is an aspect of the game that is basically unique is great for new players. At least it was for me, it was part of what git me hooked. I think falling for a margin trade scam would suck though.

I think steps need to be taken to relieve the massive scam spam in Jita. If someone can perpetrate a good scam, more power to them, but CCP should work to eliminate the incessant stream of pure, non-thoughtful, local scams which are likely perpetrated by bots considering I see the same names all the time, no matter what time of day I happen to be logging in.

Another major point some people like Ripard don't notice, is that the VAST majority of the things they say "push new players out of the game" like scams and ganking don't actually affect new players as often as bitter vets.

NTM, idk how they would look at someone like me who regularly scams and awoxes, but also runs a website that gives ISK away and regularly giving ships away to people as well.

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